The real promise of Fundrise is that it gives pro-growth members of the
community a way to become literally and figuratively invested in the
success of a project. A building owned by hundreds of local people,
rather than owned as part of a pooled investment vehicle marketed to
pension funds, is one that’s much more likely to get a sympathetic
hearing from local authorities. It’s also one that’s much more likely to
inspire people to show up to meetings and hearings and make the case
for development and expansion. As George Mason University Law School’s
David Schleicher has observed,
despite the stereotype of politically powerful real-estate developers,
in practice most cities’ legal framework “creates a peculiar procedure
that privileges the intense preferences of local residents opposed to
new building.” The best solution to this would be to change the legal
framework and reduce the peculiar privileging. But within the existing
political order, broadening the scope of potential stakeholders is
promising solution. Perhaps if people owned little slices of their
neighborhood, urban politics could take a broader view of development
and unleash more of the economic potential sitting beneath our cities.

Over
the past decade, a number of state and local governments have amended
land use regulations to permit the accessory dwelling units (“ADUs”) on
single-family lots. Measured by raw numbers of reforms, the campaign
to secure legal reforms permitting ADUs appears to be a tremendous
success. The question remains, however, whether these reforms overcome
the well-documented land-use parochialism that has, for decades,
represented a primary obstacle to increasing the supply of affordable
housing. In order to understand more about their actual effects, this
Article examines ADU reforms in a context which ought to predict a
minimal level of local parochialism. In 2002, California enacted
state-wide legislation mandating that local governments either amend
their zoning laws to permit ADUs in single-family zones or accept the
imposition of a state-dictated regulatory regime. We carefully examined
the zoning law of all California cities with populations over 50,000
people (150 total cities) to determine how local governments actually
implemented ADU reforms “on the ground” after the state legislation was
enacted. Our analysis suggests that the seeming success story masks
hidden local regulatory barriers. Local governments have responded to
local political pressures by delaying the enactment of ADU legislation
(and, in a few cases, simply refusing to do so despite the state
mandate), imposing burdensome procedural requirements that are contrary
to the spirit, if not the letter, of the state-law requirement that ADUs
be permitted “as of right,” requiring multiple off-street parking
spaces, and imposing substantive and procedural design requirements.
Taken together, these details likely dramatically suppress the value of
ADUs as a means of increasing affordable housing.

Gentrification
connotes a process where often white “outsiders” move into areas in
which once attractive properties have deteriorated due to disinvestment.
Gentrification creates seemingly positive outcomes, including
increases in property values, equity, and a city’s tax base, as well as
greater residential racial and economic integration; yet it is typically
accompanied by significant opposition. In-place residents fear that
they will either be displaced or even if they remain the newcomers will
change the culture and practices of the neighborhood. Gentrification
then is understood to cause a loss of community and autonomy – losses
that have been well recognized in the eminent domain literature.

This
article focuses on gentrifying neighborhoods that were abandoned during
the government sponsored suburban migration of the 1950s through the
1980s. Racially discriminatory practices of government and private
actors often denied Black and Latino families the option either to join
the migration to the suburbs or to maintain their homes in city
neighborhoods. This article argues that in-place residents of now
gentrifying neighborhoods should have access to rental vouchers or
low-interest loans to restore the autonomy they were previously denied,
providing them with viable, self-determining options to remain or exit
the neighborhood. Such a remedy – which is consistent with the Fair
Housing Act’s obligation to HUD and its grantees to “affirmatively
further fair housing” – has the potential to alter the political terrain
of gentrification.

Peter Katz has put together a five-part series about New Urbanisms triumphs and failures. In the final piece of his review, Katz examines New Urbanism's failure to help improve the processes of municipal governments:

Although it’s easy to criticize local government staffers for the
sprawling patterns that continue to predominate in the suburbs, as I did
in the prior installment, and have in earlier writings—there’s
plenty of blame to go around. If one is looking for a villain, I might
point also to the leadership of the New Urbanism movement for its
failure (with some notable recent exceptions) to engage local government
on its own terms.

In past conversations with the founders, I
have heard nearly all of them, at one time or another, admit to a lack
of patience with government processes and regulations, either in terms
of fully understanding them, or being willing to work within their
dictates.

Rarely
in the legal discourse is an author afforded the opportunity to revisit
and update a recently published law review article and correct
misunderstandings of a response thereto. In the first instance of the
Harvard Environmental Law Journal publishing two law review articles by
the same author in back to back volumes, Jessica Jay in 2012 authors
When Perpetual Is Not Forever: The Challenge of Changing Conditions,
Amendment, and Termination of Perpetual Conservation Easements, which
explores the area of law surrounding the amendment and termination of
perpetual conservation easements, with specific focus on the existing
legal framework, legal regimes, emerging statutory and common law, and
states’ approaches to self-guidance. Now, Jay authors Understanding
When Perpetual Is Not Forever : An Update to the Challenge of Changing
Conditions, Amendment, and Termination of Perpetual Conservation
Easements, and Response to Ann Taylor Schwing [The Challenge], which
identifies next steps and options for perpetual easement modification
and termination guidance, including revisions of the Treasury
Regulations § 1.170A-14. The Challenge posits that providing clear,
consistent guidance through existing or new legal frameworks ensures
that perpetual conservation easements and the purposes they protect will
endure over time. This Article informs about developments since the
publication of The Challenge and corrects misunderstandings asserted in
Ann Taylor Schwing’s article in the same issue of the Harvard
Environmental Law Review.

Andrew Sullivan reports that "New York fined an Airbnb host $2,400 for violating a law against illegal hotels.” Accorsing to Sullivan, Emily Badger suspects that more cases like this will trigger a reassessment of city codes:

It’s reasonable for cities to create some standards for
how residents might operate what the [Sustainable Economies Law Center]
calls “host homes” or “no-host homes.” Perhaps regulation could require
the host to register the property for a small fee, while limiting the
number of nights in a year that guests can stay there (this could be a
concession to neighbors who don’t want their block or building to become
a revolving door for tourists). The SELC also floats a cap on the
income that a host can make in a year, tied for example to the cost of
actual rent or the market value of a property (for example: your Airbnb
income can’t exceed 75 percent of your actual yearly rent and
utilities).

This last idea would certainly codify the notion that the “sharing
economy” is fundamentally a different kind of economy, one where the
ultimate goal for individual participants isn’t to make as much profit
as possible.

Marcus Wohlsen insists government will have to make way for the share economy sooner rather than later:

New York is a city built on bureaucracy, and bureaucracies
are inherently resistant to change, especially when a new technology
comes along to undermine the assumptions on which those bureaucracies
were built. And in a way that’s by design. The mechanization of the
economy and the mechanization of government have occurred in parallel,
often in the form of agencies meant to check industries’ more flagrant
violations of the social contract. In a sense, those bureaucracies’
express mission is to hinder progress.

Still, renting out your room when you’re not home or your car when
you’re not driving it hardly feels flagrant. If people and the
politicians they elect feel the same way, these bureaucratic roadblocks
to the sharing economy’s rise will also turn out to be very temporary.
Whether or not Airbnb, RelayRides or Uber turn out to be the companies
that define the future of sharing, the idea of using technology to
leverage any resource’s excess idle capacity seems too sensible—and
popular—to fail.

In the case of Airbnb, New York City’s zoning and
administrative codes were so numerous and confusing that the client hit
with the fine had no idea that he was breaking the law simply by renting
out his room. A legal system in which the average citizen can’t make
sense of when or how he or she is doing something illegal is not only
unfair but a serious detriment to quality of life. America is not going
to create the service jobs it needs to stay vital in the post-industrial age by making it hard for small-time entrepreneurs to succeed.

Property
Law is about things, but only secondarily. It is primarily about
relationships between people as they pertain to things. As a result,
although we commonly identify material and immaterial things as private,
common, or state property, property law deals with the subset of human
relationships that determines rights and responsibilities with respect
to things. The institution of property law — the rules that define this
subset of human relationships — arises in the context of scarcity. When
things are scarce and accordingly hold exchange value, humans construct
ideas of ownership. We have been doing so for millennia, or at least
long enough that the subject of property law has acquired a reputation
as antiquarian. Certainly in the common law tradition, many property law
courses appear lost in the mist of English legal history. This need not
be so. Property law deals with the allocation of scarce resources and
therefore is also about the allocation of power. Understood this way,
property law can be a lens through which to understand many of the most
pressing social issues of the day. Similarly, the history of property
law need not be dull. At least ten centuries of social change, economic
transformation, technological innovation, and human drama can be seen in
the customs and conventions, judicial decisions, and statutes that
comprise the law of property in common law jurisdictions. In American
Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own, Stuart Banner, the
prolific legal historian and property law scholar, sets out to describe
contestation and change in ideas about property over several centuries
in the United States. The result is a beautifully and accessibly written
book, stunning in scope, elegant in structure, and remarkably revealing
in its detail about the debates over and the uses of property law
doctrine and of the broader ideas that support the divergent interests
and claims.

Professor
Saxer, along with Professor Carol M. Rose, discuss a collection of
articles that was first presented at the 2013 Association of American
Law Schools Joint Program of the Property Section and Natural Resources
and Energy Law Section. The collection represents several views about
how the relationship between the environment and property rights may
develop, and how some of the biggest issues we will face may alter
property rights, as we currently understand them. The impact of
technology on environmental concerns and the challenge of climate change
are just two of the issues presented in the papers.